The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means took the Chair as Deputy Speaker, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Alan Williams: My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon explained that to me personally, too.
	After negotiations with the Home Office, the Bill became not only shorter but clearer. My only regret, if I may make a personal comment, is that the great scourge of private Members' Bills, as I described him in Committee, Eric Forth, is not here today. I do not think that my Bill was a unique case, but Eric actually suggested that he supported its intentions. I pointed out to him in a slightly mischievous way that his only objection was exactly the one espoused by the Home Office. I felt that that combined opposition was too much for me to take on, and so we are considering a truncated Bill. The Bill has been welcomed by the emergency services. Strangely enough, it has been welcomed in Northern Ireland, too, which has asked for the Bill to apply there, because it has no such provisions on ambulance workers.
	The Bill addresses the offence of impeding emergency workers. It is based on two straightforward, simple principles. First, people who risk their lives to save others should not be obstructed, and should be free to undertake their rescue work without obstruction and attack by yobs and idiots. Secondly, people who need to be rescued in an emergency because they are in danger should not face additional danger because of the mindless activity of a minority of idiots. Rescue work is essentially a team operation, and it is important that the team operate together. If part of the team is dislocated, the team does not work as effectively, so victims could be at greater danger. Sadly, that has become more important now, because of the threat of terrorist attacks.
	On Second Reading, I mentioned the unbelievable conduct of some people, and I will reiterate a few examples. Greater Manchester fire and rescue service helped to lead a campaign on the subject, with the prompting and help of the  Manchester Evening News. The fire and rescue service reports as many as 200 incidents a year of impeding and assault. Barry Dixon, who gave me considerable briefings on the Bill, told me of incidents from across the country of pipes being cut to stop the water supply. That is the least of the imaginative devices that some thugs use. Stoning is not unknown, and scaffold poles have even been driven through the windscreens of fire tenders. Fires have been lit deliberately as an ambush to lure the fire services to places where the thugs are waiting for them. Once inside, firemen find such refined tactics as razorblades fixed underneath banisters, so that as they try to haul their equipment upstairs their hands are severely injured.
	There was an instance of live electric wiring being fixed to the inside of a door, so that the firemen trying to reach the source of the fire were in danger of electrocution. In the most grotesque case, in a multi-floor building, a hole in the floor was covered with a mat, like a bear trap, so that firemen coming in were in danger of plummeting to the floor below. That is the sort of dangerous nonsense that our rescue services have to endure.
	The Bill's provisions are wide-ranging. Clause 1 covers firefighters, rescue services, ambulance workers, including air ambulance workers, and voluntary organisations. I stress the latter, because some people were afraid that voluntary organisations were omitted. As Opposition Front Benchers proposed in Committee, clause 2 covers individuals who come to the help of the emergency services. The Bill covers the coastguard, lifeboat crews, and people transporting blood, organs and medical and rescue equipment to the site of an emergency. That is a list of provisions in the Bill, but the trouble with lists is that they are not always accurate and do not always fully reflect need. For that reason, we have built in a safeguard clause, which means that the list is not conclusive. That safeguard clause—clause 5—allows the Minister by order to add or remove categories of workers that they think need to be added. That builds in flexibility, so that we can act if the idiots find new targets.

Clive Efford: I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams). He was kind enough to ask me to be a sponsor of the Bill, but with his experience of the procedures of the House it was not the most onerous task to support his Bill as he is so capable of steering it through all its stages. It is no surprise that it has reached Third Reading this morning.
	When my right hon. Friend moved Third Reading, he mentioned Eric Forth, my former constituency neighbour in Bromley, and the fact that he was fortunate enough to have Eric Forth's support for the intent of his Bill. I pay tribute to Eric Forth as a formidable opponent and a regular at our sittings on a Friday morning. My two Bills on environmental measures, which I fought for several years to get through the House, always fell on what became known as Eric Forth's killing fields for private Members' Bills. I had to sit silently as he eloquently talked them into oblivion. I am pleased to say that elements of one of my Bills have been resurrected in the legislation on home information packs, but sadly not with my name on them. None the less, Eric Forth was a formidable person who will be missed at our Friday morning debates.
	It is surprising that we need to address the issue that is covered by the Bill. We have had emergency workers for many years and the problem is not new, but the Bill will be welcomed by those workers.
	I understand that accident and emergency workers have been excluded from the Bill. It is arguable that in their daily work they frequently need immediately to respond to the needs of people who have been brought in for care and attention, and obstructing accident and emergency workers can have catastrophic consequences for people who need their attention. I accept that accident and emergency workers work in buildings and that they are often supported by security guards, but they face a great deal of aggression for no apparent reason. I have witnessed such behaviour when I have accompanied people to accident and emergency. The obstruction of such workers should be dealt with more severely, and the situation would be simplified if the Bill applied to them, too.
	The Government's respect agenda, although not directly addressed by the Bill, is part of what the Bill seeks to achieve because it is better to prevent emergency workers from being obstructed or attacked while carrying out their duties in the first place. I commend the work of the Metropolitan police, the fire service and others to explain to young people the dangers posed by things that they do sometimes for a lark and the consequences for other people if they impede emergency workers. That approach includes explaining to young people the importance of the work done by emergency workers and the dangers to which emergency workers expose themselves in addition to the problem of their possibly being attacked. That helps young people to address antisocial behaviour in the wider community and gets them to understand the consequences of their actions for not only emergency workers, but people who need emergency services.

Barbara Keeley: I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I think that he is absolutely right. I was a councillor for a number of years and was aware of such initiatives, which do a great deal of good.
	I am here to support the Bill because the incident to which I have referred was much more serious than verbally abusing fire crews or throwing things at them. I find it shameful that one of my constituents did what I have described to a firefighter. I feel badly about that for the fire crew. There is a case for saying that we must start with people when they are at a very young age. The young man I mentioned was convicted and, rightly, received a 12-month sentence for an appalling incident. He was 17 and a half years old. It is serious when someone gets to that age and, unbelievably, thinks that it is acceptable or a jape to brandish a weapon at a fire fighter who was doing his job and trying to protect the local community.
	The chief fire officer for Greater Manchester and Councillor Fred Walker, who is the chair of the Greater Manchester fire authority, are concerned. They have told me that they want Members to hear about the incident to which I have referred so that we can understand the threat that fire crews face daily. It must be shocking and difficult for someone to return to work the next day, or even the same week, when they have been the victim of such a severe incident. We need the Bill because of that threat.

Michael Gove: The hon. Lady rightly draws attention to a horrific incident. I have every sympathy with the firefighters in her constituency. She must be aware that the Government have deleted the specific provisions that the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) wants to cover assault and to ensure that it is an aggravated offence?

Lynda Waltho: I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on his Bill, which is both timely and much needed. Its purpose is to deal with a genuine and urgent problem.
	During previous deliberations, we heard statistics relating to offences against emergency workers, including actual assaults. The situation is improving in some sectors, such as the NHS, since the introduction of programmes such as conflict resolution training and the determination of the NHS to protect its staff by prosecuting offenders. There were about 37,000 assaults in 2003 and the numbers went down to about 11,000 in 2004-05. Those figures relate to acute hospitals. New orders, such as acceptable behaviour orders, are assisting generally, but there is still a job to be done to prevent incidents occurring. That is where the Bill will do its job. We must get in earlier, as it were. The news that the Government are supporting the new offence of obstructing an emergency worker in responding to an emergency will help to plug the gap and further diminish the number of incidents involving emergency workers. It will give them the same respect and protection in law as that which is accorded to our police force.
	I was speaking to my local ambulance personnel recently. They were keen that I and my hon. Friends should support the Bill. That is why I am here instead of opening fêtes and fairs, the number of which seems to be growing exponentially in my constituency It is important that I make sure that the Bill goes forward so as to assist ambulance personnel and others in their work. I am proud to be in the Chamber to support the Bill.
	The obstruction of emergency workers responding to emergencies is a heinous crime that at best is irritating and troublesome and at worst potentially life threatening. The consequent danger and damage to the person awaiting emergency assistance can be devastating. I am pleased that the Bill defines emergency workers as firefighters and those transporting blood, organs and medical equipment, as well as coastguards and lifeboat crews. It is especially welcome that it covers all ambulance workers, including those working in air ambulances, volunteers and those working under contract to the health service.
	I am especially concerned about the safety of those in our ambulance service and paramedics, whom I consider the unsung infantry of the NHS. I am therefore particularly pleased that the protection contained in the Bill is extended to them in clause 1(2)(c). They work in extremely stressful and sometimes dangerous circumstances. They are on the scene of an accident from the start and they use their skills to save lives. We should also have pride in them and they deserve not only our gratitude and respect, but our protection. They should be protected from harm and from obstruction in going about their duties, and they should have support in law.

Lynda Waltho: I thank my hon. Friend for those comments. I had hoped to get on to that point, although I was not going to be quite as obvious. Part of what I intended to do as an MP was to get out and about, particularly with public service workers. I am a former teacher, but teaching was probably not as dangerous—at least it did not feel as dangerous—as some of the situations I have been in since I started going out on duty with police crews and the ambulance service. I believe that doing that should be part of my role as an MP.
	I recently worked a night shift with an ambulance crew from Stourbridge station, which is an experience that I recommend to all parliamentary colleagues. Experiencing situations is very different from reading about them, or even from hearing first-hand stories. That experience has served to deepen my respect for the ambulance service and its personnel. I hope that it might also have deepened their respect for Members of Parliament, but we shall have to wait and see about that.  [Interruption.] I hope that it might at least have deepened that crew's respect for their own MP.
	That night shift began at 9 pm and finished at 6 am. I do not think that anybody expected me to work the whole shift, so I think I got brownie points for doing so. Apart from one rest break at about 3 am, the crew work solidly for the duration, going from call to call and either tending to patients on site or, in some cases, taking them to hospital. At all times duringthat shift, they were constantly on guard, constantly concentrating and working together with almost unseen communication between them. The whole process was very uplifting.
	We attended a variety of cases, including a cut head at the local swimming baths, a road traffic accident, alcohol-related incidents, a suspected heart attack, a young woman with severe abdominal pains, a distressed and disturbed patient in need of assistance, and the rescue—I do call it a rescue—and treatment of two young men who were the victims of a group attack. That attack underlined to me how helpful a Bill such as this could be.
	We were returning to hospital with a patient from one of the other incidents that I have mentioned, when the paramedic who was driving noticed a man by the roadside whom he believed to be receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation—CPR. He called in the incident immediately, which is the right procedure, but he also took an immediate decision to divert our ambulance to it to assist. Upon parking it became clear that the incident was quite different from how it had first appeared. The young man on the floor was in fact being attacked, and his friend, whom my colleague—if I can use that description—from the crew had initially thought was giving CPR, was actually protecting him from further blows.
	Both paramedics attempted to calm the situation and to assist both young men under attack. They managed to negotiate successfully, through a highly charged situation, and the young men were then attended to, and the badly injured patient on the floor was carried into the ambulance. However, while that was happening, two bystanders who had not previously been involved in the incident, attempted to prevent it by barring the way to the injured party and then hitting out at one of the paramedics as the injured man was lifted into the ambulance. Local police arrived within two minutes of the call to them having been made, and the situation calmed. But in those two minutes, when lives could have been lost and immediate assessments and quick judgment were needed, the professionalism and dedication of my two colleagues shone through. Of course, that was a one-off experience for me, but men and women such as my two Stourbridge paramedics face such situations day in, day out, night in, night out. That incident brought home to me that inadequate protection is sometimes afforded to such excellent professionals.
	I also welcome the provision in clause 3 that allows a person to be convicted for impeding an emergency worker "by action directed" at a vehicle used by an emergency worker, because of another unfortunate aspect of the incident I have described, which occurred as we began to drive back to the hospital with our injured patient and prior to the police establishing order in the fracas. At one point, two young men mounted the steps at the side of the driver's door and attempted to prevent our ambulance from moving away. The situation was unbelievably tense, but once again the calm and professional manner of my colleagues, and the way in which they handled the situation, enabled all of us to leave safely and to get the patient to hospital quickly.
	The enacting of this legislation will underline our great respect for services such as the ambulance service, and it will also send a message to those who have less respect for them than us and to those who would try to frustrate their staff in their work. The decision to support the increase in the penalty for such behaviour to up to £5,000 will also serve to indicate to the wider public how seriously we regard such offences.
	Members have mentioned other methods of getting this message out. I wish briefly to mention the work of the west midlands ambulance service, which runs an education programme throughout the midlands. It goes into schools and community groups to raise awareness of its work and to help to draw young people in particular closer to the service to encourage respect for its workers and appreciation of the role they play. When he speaks, will the Minister underline possible future plans to publicise and widen that educational role, which is very important?
	Finally, I congratulate again my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on his success so far with this Bill, and I hope that colleagues from all parties will continue to support it in its latter stages.

Clive Efford: Yes, he is!

Meg Hillier: My apologies. He has moved places, just to confuse me.
	My hon. Friend talked about the Government's respect agenda. Throughout the debate, there has been an undercurrent of comments about the lack of respect that these attacks demonstrate. They illustrate a lack of respect from young people and adults towards the vital services that emergency workers provide to us all. The Government's respect agenda and the provisions of the Bill meet up in a very helpful way in that regard.
	My hon. Friends the Members for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) and for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) highlighted horrific examples of the problems that some emergency workers face. I want to place on record the fact that I have now been inspired to go out with emergency workers in Hackney. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge said, there is nothing like doing it if we want to learn at first hand the difficulties that emergency workers face. My hon. Friend's indignation highlighted the points that she raised, and I congratulate her on one the most eloquent speeches that I have heard her make in the House.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) is not in the Chamber today, but my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) paid homage to his skills as an orator in the House on these sitting Fridays. I commend her particularly for her eloquence and statistical knowledge, and for the research that she has done on this important issue. I will not go into the issue of the Olympics in Newham, but she will realise that I mention it in passing because they will be taking place in Hackney as well.
	We are here to discuss the Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill. It is an important Bill, because our emergency workers are the backbone of a decent and caring society. The citizens of a well-run country with a responsive and effective Government expect proper and appropriate action to be taken in an emergency or crisis. They should receive such action, and we should do all that we can to prevent anything from hindering it. That is what the Bill is all about. It underlines and reinforces the totally legitimate expectation of British citizens that emergency workers will be able to carry out their duties and serve the public without fear of obstruction.
	We have focused on the police, fire and ambulance services today. I am glad, however, that the Bill also covers voluntary organisations and other agencies that work on behalf of the state. These include organisations such as St. John Ambulance, and the mountain rescue teams that provide such great service in remote parts of our islands to rescue people in difficulty. No one has yet mentioned the lifeboat crews, who voluntarily do a great deal in their free time to rescue people in difficulty at sea. Speaking as a former merchant seawoman, I feel strongly about safety at sea, and it is vital that the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution should be recognised in our debate today.
	The offence of assaulting a police officer already exists, as hon. Members have mentioned. It carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison, as does common assault. The criminal law includes a range of powers and penalties to protect individuals from violent behaviour. Perhaps the lawyers in the House will criticise me for saying this, but I am not too concerned about the difference. My concern is the outcome. If someone is prevented from doing their job—be they a police officer, a firefighter, an ambulance worker or any of the other emergency workers that we have mentioned—the sentence must be proportionate to the crime. Sentencing guidelines allow the courts to take into account that the person involved is a public sector worker. The Bill will reinforce and underline that, by creating a separate offence.

Richard Younger-Ross: The hon. Lady mentioned St. John Ambulance. A St. John Ambulance crew attended a carnival in Chudleigh in my constituency recently, to provide first aid services. Is she aware that, if someone tried to prevent those crew members from doing that a job, it would not be offence under the provisions of the Bill? The legislation would kick in only for an ambulance capable of carrying out blue-light duties responding to a blue-light incident.

Meg Hillier: We are becoming involved in definitions now. It is a question of whether St John Ambulance, for instance, is attending on behalf of the public service, which will often not be the case. I may not be best qualified to comment on such questions, but the Minister may be able to clarify the position. The hon. Member for Teignbridge may not be hon. and learned, but he is certainly au fait with parts of the law with which I, as a new Member, am less familiar.
	As I have said, the sentencing guidelines allow sentences for attacks on public servants to be weighted. I hope that the Sentencing Advisory Panel's recent consultation on sentencing for violent crimes against the person will produce some sensible proposals. Perhaps the Minister could give us a tantalising glimpse of anything that may have emerged from that consultation, which was wide-ranging and to which a number of interesting contributions were made. That might reassure Members, including me, that some of the points we have raised could be dealt with in that way rather than by the Bill.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham spoke of "young people larking around", and impeding emergency workers. As he and others have pointed out, education is an important way of tackling that kind of obstruction. I also agree with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes).
	I want to say something about the work of the London fire service. I am particularly impressed by what Graham Howgate, the Hackney borough commander, has done in collaboration with the Shoreditch service. They have been working with fire cadets. Young people are chosen for the scheme because they are likely to become criminals if they are not channelled in the right direction at a particular time. They may commit a crime if they are not given support, and this excellent scheme provides them with that support. It gives them a sense of purpose, and educates them about the work of the fire service. The results have been good so far, and I wonder why the scheme has not been adopted more widely. Although such matters are not in the Minister's remit, I hope he will take up that question with Ministers in other Departments.
	Since the creation of a borough command unit in Hackney some interesting collaborative work has been done, thanks largely to Valerie Shawcross, chair of the London fire authority. Although largely unsung, her achievement has been significant.
	One of the first things that Commander Howgate and his team observed was that a number of fires are started in abandoned cars. They would often have to deal with such fires, and clear up the mess. Such fires were frequently started by young people in particular spots in Hackney, but happily the problem has now been solved. Cars are removed much more quickly, because the fire service mapped the incidence of the attacks. It was realised that if the cars were removed, there would be less arson, less antisocial behaviour and fewer opportunities for young people to impede emergency workers in connection with their crimes.
	Although the Bill is welcome, the low-level obstruction that Members have mentioned is also important. The Hackney firefighters repeatedly find that equipment is stolen from their fire engines when they are out on a job. They themselves may not be impeded, but bolt cutters—which are particularly popular—and other emergency equipment are often stolen as trophies. Lack of respect for public services is a crucial part of what the Bill attempts to tackle. It deals with the worst elements, but we and, in particular, the Government have a responsibility to consider a number of possible solutions.
	I was disturbed by the example given by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, which involved an adult. We should bear in mind that young people do not always cause these problems, although we tend to focus on them. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) is smiling, because of course he wants to hug the hoodies, but not all young people are bad, whether they wear hoodies or not.
	The Bill sends out an important signal about the seriousness of impeding emergency workers. Members may have heard of a project called "Prison? Me? No way!". It is run by an educational trust set up by prison officers, which visits secondary school across the country to demonstrate the reality of prison to young people. There is a mock-up of a cell on the back of a lorry, and young people are locked into it. Prison officers drill the young people in teams, and explain to them clearly what the prison regime means. In combination with such educational initiatives, the Bill should help young people to realise gradually that if they commit the offences that we have heard about today, they could end up in prison. Organisations like the one that I have described are there to remind them that that is a very undesirable consequence of such action.
	The Bill obviously focuses on the criminal act of impeding emergency workers, but the services themselves have acted both to protect their staff and, crucially, to encourage them to report incidents. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley, Greater Manchester is ahead of the game because of the particular problems that it has experienced. Various initiatives have been launched, including the placing of video cameras in the cabs of appliances so that offenders can be identified. I know that one of the Opposition parties has persistently resisted the installation of CCTV. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Teignbridge wants to tell us now whether he supports the move to put video cameras in cabs. It appears that he does not wish to take me up on that, but it may be a subject for another debate.
	As we heard earlier, in Northern Ireland support is already given to firefighters along the lines suggested in the Bill, but the Bill will apply to ambulance workers and coast guards there. It is important to recognise that it will not apply only to England.
	Although the Bill mainly concerns ambulance workers, we should bear in mind the implications for other public service workers, notably in the national health service. Early indications suggest that 71 per cent. of staff trained in the NHS to deal with potentially aggressive and violent incidents believe that they have the necessary skills to do so, compared with only 29 per cent. before the training. We must not sit back and assume that the Bill alone will solve the problem. I am sure none of my hon. Friends are doing that. We may try to initiate further debates in the House to discuss other ways of protecting emergency workers. The law is an important tool, but it is not the only one.
	The NHS, supported by the British Medical Association, Unison and the Royal College of Nursing, has produced posters reminding would-be offenders of the tough penalties that they could incur. I hope that public information campaigns will stress the reality that the Bill is law, and that people may, in the most serious cases, be sent to prison.
	Several of us have mentioned young people and antisocial behaviour. What is needed is proper youth work, and I am glad that the Government have provided more money for the purpose. In my borough of Hackney, nearly £1 million extra will be spent on youth work this year. We pay attention to the respect agenda, and aim to tackle antisocial behaviour at all levels, nipping it in the bud. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham said, it must come to be seen as absolutely unacceptable.
	The decent folk whom I meet on doorsteps nearly every week want to lead peaceful lives. They do not want their emergency workers to be impeded. Low-level activity escalates quickly if it is not challenged, and we must challenge it. Sport, including competitive sport, is an important way of channelling young people's energies in the right direction, as is education. I will cite one example from a visit to Mossbourne city academy on the edge of my constituency. I talked to children and staff at the school, and asked one child what he liked about the school. He said that he liked the discipline. I was surprised that a 12-year-old said that, as one does not tend to think of that as a top desire of a child of that age.

Michael Gove: Young Conservative.  [Laughter.]

Helen Southworth: Like other hon. Members, I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) for introducing the Bill because I, too, have done night shifts and day shifts with police, ambulance and fire services and with accident and emergency services at the hospital in my constituency. I greatly admire people who spend their time in public service and now that I have worked those shifts with the emergency services my admiration for what they do knows no bounds. They go out and work in a difficult environment trying to resolve some substantial problems, and they do so in a way that is kind and friendly and helps people who are in severe distress. Like other hon. Members, I think that it is outrageous that, when doing that, they face the threat of attack and aggression.
	I have received a communication from Cheshire fire service—an admirable fire service—telling me that there were 25 reported incidents in 2005. On 21 occasions, stones, bricks, bottles, iron bars or golf balls were thrown at crew attending incidents. On several of those occasions, the vehicle but not the crew was hit, and on four occasions the appliance was forced to withdraw to ensure the safety of crew and prevent the situation from worsening. Some of the incidents were severe: for example, a firefighter attending a rubbish fire was attacked by two youths who smashed his visor on his helmet, cutting his eye. Other incidents have involved water bombs being thrown that forced the appliance to swerve when it was trying to get to a fire to tackle it. A fire service mechanic was travelling in his marked vehicle when two youths pulled out what appeared to be a firearm and aimed it at the vehicle. A crew member on an appliance that was attending a rubbish fire was hit by a 2-ft iron bar. So far in 2006, stones, bricks, bottles and other debris have been thrown at crews attending incidents on eight occasions, causing crew to consider whether they can get through to deal with the fire. Firefighters attending a fire in June were threatened with knives by a gang of youths and the crew was forced to withdraw from the scene.
	All those incidents are taken extremely seriously by Cheshire fire and rescue service, which is working to increase the safety of its personnel. The service has installed closed-circuit television cameras on appliances in a number of the areas it covers, and it intends to introduce them across its whole area as soon as it can. In addition, appliances have high-visibility stickers stating that they are equipped with CCTV recording equipment. The service is determined not only to deter such incidents, but to make it clear to people that offenders who can be identified will be prosecuted.
	Not only does our fire service deal with emergency fires, but it tries to prevent them. We have an extremely effective initiative whereby a home safety assessment is completed every 15 minutes, every day, seven days a week. I particularly admire our fire service personnel for the way in which they constantly seek ways to introduce safety into our local community. As well as going out, risking their own lives and safety in dangerous incidents, they are looking for ways to make our community a better place to live by helping people to make their homes safe and dealing with slip and trip hazards for older people.
	The fire service is also involving local young people in such work. At a surgery in a community building that had had problems with fires being lit, I saw fire crews talking to quite young children and explaining to them what a fire does, how dangerous it can be, and their role in helping to make their local community safer. The children were getting very involved—actually, they had a great time. Adults were treating them with respect and the children were learning directly from important role models what respect means in a local community. I was pleased because the community in question has a number of disadvantages and having adults of that type—admirable role models—coming in is not just about dealing with current problems, but about giving young people an opportunity to see what they can do in future.

Tony McNulty: I congratulate the Father of the House on securing the Bill and on facilitating its smooth passage.
	As a member of the 1997 intake and a London MP, let me start in the same place as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) did. At that time, we sat for perhaps half the Fridays available instead of 13. That was an interesting way to get more and more practice in this place. None of us can ever get enough of that. We had all-day Adjournment debates as well as debates on private Members' Bills. I remember with great fondness duelling constantly, but mostly failing in the attempt, with my right hon. Friend—I hope that he would not have minded me calling him that—the former Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. As this is the first time that I have participated on a Friday since his sad demise, I want to put on record how much I learned from him. He was much maligned, misunderstood and excoriated—not least by Labour Members who did not know any better—but he will be sadly missed, not least by the 1997 intake of Friday boys, some of whom have been mentioned in dispatches today and some not.
	I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on securing cross-party support for the Bill. I also congratulate him on selecting, from among the plethora of choice of legal advice in this House, my hon. Friends the Members for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) rather than certain other learned colleagues. I can furnish him with a list of those on both sides of the House from whom he should never seek legal advice.
	It is important—this has underscored many of today's speeches—to say what precisely the Bill is supposed to do. It is not an attempt to reinvent assault legislation. It is not an attempt to establish a legislative framework for other things such as education awareness, antisocial behaviour, respect and all the other relevant considerations that hon. Members have mentioned. The Bill does not seek to achieve all that. Nor does it seek to afford aggravated status to the offence of obstructing emergency workers—a point to which I shall return.
	However, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) suggests, the Bill seeks to fill a serious gap. Many of the concerns that he and my hon. Friends expressed would be more relevant if we wanted the Bill to be an overall comprehensive measure like the Scottish Act, but the Bill does not profess to be such a measure. There is no need for that, not least because, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath well knows, the Scottish Act sought to fill considerably more gaps in the Scottish legislative framework, and those gaps simply are not there in English legislation.
	I had to check my notes on this point, but I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West, for saying that a Bill that the Home Office had anything to do with was short and clear. That has not entirely been my experience, either as a Back Bencher or as a Minister, particularly in the Home Office, so I am grateful for those comments. The Bill is short and clear—rightly so, because these are extraordinarily serious matters, and filling the gap is hugely important.
	I must confess that although hon. Friends and colleagues have tried to explain such behaviour, I do not entirely understand why people think it a clever, smart or positive use of spare time to throw rocks at ambulances, or why they regard people in uniform who seek to help the public, and who invariably save lives, as invading their turf, or think that they are just "uniforms", like the police. Some colleagues were even more generous, saying that the blue lights sparked off adrenaline, everyone became terribly excited, and testosterone levels went through the roof, but none of those are excuses for impeding, obstructing or doing something worse to prevent our emergency workers from going about their business. That simply is not right in any way, shape or form. Whether it is just a kick-out at authority, or whatever the excuse is, or not, it must desist, and we must introduce legislation that addresses the issues—and the Bill is a necessary part of that.
	I know—all the more because, happily, there is a cross-party approach to the Bill—that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) would tell us that the perpetrators simply need a bit more love and affection. He would say that they are much misunderstood, and if only we understood them more, everything would be so different, and that we should hug them or whatever—but I do not agree with that approach, either. However, to take one step back, I agree with the opening sentence of the contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—her point was repeated by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous)—that we have to go a long way back along the chain and consider issues such as parenting, family breakdown and other factors that are the antecedents of antisocial behaviour, to try to address such matters. That is part of the Government's comprehensive approach.
	Many of my hon. Friends mentioned the respect agenda and what we are trying to do to tackle antisocial behaviour. That very much fits in with trying to take preventive measures, but we have heard some horrendous stories this morning about the ways in which people seek to impede and obstruct emergency workers. Some of the points that colleagues have made are entirely fair and were dealt with in Committee. Some have been answered, but some perhaps will need to be revisited. It was right and proper to try to define an emergency worker as narrowly as possible, but also to include the escape clause so that we can consider adding to the categories, if experience dictates that the list is not adequate. I understand what was said by many colleagues about social workers and people who, in the course of their routine day-to-day work, may not necessarily be construed as emergency workers, but who are often put in positions in which they solve or help to solve an emergency. Those people deserve to be covered by the Bill so that they are not obstructed while carrying out their work. Those matters can and should be considered.
	As I said, the Bill was not intended to reinvent assault legislation in the context of public workers. We are doing that in many other ways. It has been pointed out that unlike Scotland, we have the Sentencing Guidelines Council. It already almost imposes a tariff for impeding people in the execution of public service, and we are considering in detail, with the council, other ways in which sentences can reflect the spirit and sentiment of the Bill. It is appropriate that many colleagues have put the wider issues of assault of public sector workers generally, and emergency workers specifically, in the context of the Bill, but the Bill does not try to do everything. Its narrow focus is appropriate.
	It probably was inappropriate that the original Bill almost exactly reflected the Scottish provision, given that we do not start from the same legislative base. I shall say very carefully—and I shall not, as I was invited to, tease the House about what the Sentencing Guidelines Council may or may not say—that that is a matter that the Government should keep under review. Having set up the Sentencing Guidelines Council, we should let it do its work. If that achieves what we want with respect to the legislative base, that is more appropriately done in that way, although I reserve our right to return to the matter.

Charles Hendry: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
	It is a great privilege to open this Second Reading debate on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), in whose name the Bill stands. Sadly, my right hon. Friend cannot be in the House today, because of commitments to fight for the interests of his constituents in Sussex, but that should not take away from the importance of the issue or lead anybody to conclude that the Bill is not widely supported by hon. Members, and, in particular, by those in the south-east and other parts of country that face excessive housing development.
	The purpose of the Bill could not be clearer. The south-east faces unprecedented and unwanted pressure for new houses. The infrastructure is already creaking, and there is grave concern about the implications if many new houses are built before the infrastructure is improved to accommodate them. That is one of a number of issues that concern hon. Members. In particular, I draw attention to the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) will introduce to change the designation of gardens from brownfield sites, which is currently causing extreme problems in many parts of the country and particularly in the south-east.
	The Bill requires a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas in which significant housing development is planned. It has been introduced because there is growing concern that the Government plan for massive housing building in the south-east will lead to a substantial deficit in the region's infrastructure. Local authorities in the south-east earmarked by Government for significant amounts of new house building estimate their individual infrastructure deficits to be about £1 billion each. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) will be familiar with that figure, as it was calculated by his district council. The cost of providing adequate infrastructure for the Government's house building targets for the south-east has been more formally estimated at £45 billion at least.
	In March 2006, the South East England regional assembly submitted the south- east plan to Government, recommending an additional 28,900 new dwellings a year as sustainable housing growth for the south-east. For many of us, that figure was already much higher than we believed the region could sustain. However, as the consultation period on the south-east plan closed, the Government published a report examining the impact of building up to 60 per cent. more houses than was suggested in the already controversial SEERA plans. Typically of the Government, the report was published on the Government office for the south-east website without adequate attention being drawn to its presence there.
	There is therefore a real concern that the Government are determined to impose even higher levels of house building in the south-east than SEERA had itself suggested, which, as I have said, many of us felt was already too high, especially given that recent legislative changes mean that the Secretary of State now has a veto over all stages of the planning process, from regional strategy to local plans, even after examination in public. That brings even greater focus to our concerns in these matters.
	Government spending on our infrastructure is already woefully inadequate. The community infrastructure fund is a mere £295 million for London and the wider south-east. Compare that figure with the figure I gave earlier of a £45 billion infrastructure deficit across the south-east in general. If that is not bad enough, there is also the worry that the current system of section 106 agreements will soon be replaced by the Government's new system of planning gain supplement. This new system will siphon off the majority of development gains into a central fund for strategic infrastructure. That is new Labour-speak for the Treasury, and yet another example of funds being taken away from the south-east to be distributed to other parts of the country.
	Last year, the south-east county councils commissioned ICM to carry out the largest-ever survey of public opinion on the south-east plan. The headline result is stark indeed. The survey revealed that 60 per cent. of people in the south-east are not confident that the supply of infrastructure in the region will keep pace with new house building. The percentages of people saying which types of infrastructure should be given priority come as no surprise: 48 per cent. said that NHS hospitals should be given priority; 48 per cent. also said that priority should be given to public transport; 31 per cent. said that it should be given to major road projects.
	The Bill would force a serious rethink about where the infrastructure is weakest and it would require a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas where significant housing development is being proposed.

Lyn Brown: Is the hon. Gentleman genuinely suggesting that the Government in perhaps the Lee valley or the Thames Gateway are not doing what is necessary by laying down the foundations of good community projects and infrastructure, including housing, parks and libraries, to create the new communities that are desperately needed my our area of London?

Charles Hendry: Of course there will be some parts of the country that the hon. Lady may be more familiar with than I am where the Government are investing in that infrastructure. I am saying that more generally across the south-east that infrastructure is already lacking and that unless steps are taken now to address the problem, with hundreds of thousands of houses being proposed, the situation will become catastrophically worse.

Barbara Keeley: I wish to make a point in response to what the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) said about community hospitals. I hope that the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) agrees that we are moving away from having smaller-unit hospitals because the advice of health professionals these days is that we want hospitals that can cover all the needs that people have and that have all the diagnostic equipment that people need. A plethora of new community hospitals is not the answer to the situation we face.

Charles Hendry: I have already been generous in giving way, so perhaps the hon. Lady will make her own speech in due course.
	The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on water management recently considered water infrastructure in relation to the Government's house-building targets. Many of its findings are particularly damaging. It says that
	"the ODPM failed sufficiently to consult the water industry directly—or to give due consideration to the water management implications—when formulating the Sustainable Communities Plan and selecting the growth areas."
	The report also said:
	"It is worrying that the housing growth plans have not in many cases been factored into the water companies' long-term plans due to the way in which Government have initiated the planning."
	Thirdly, the Lords report recommends the provisions in the Bill, urging that
	"the Government consider making water companies statutory consultees on applications for developments comprising a number of properties that exceeds a given threshold. It would also be desirable to make the Environment Agency a statutory consultee on water supply issues in these circumstances."
	The irony is that the Government will allow water companies to raise prices to meet the enormous cost of providing new water infrastructure—a double blow for residents in the south-east, where people are effectively being asked to fund the infrastructure for houses that they do not even want. Even the Government's preferred think-tank believes that current policy has been conceptually flawed. The Institute for Public Policy Research commission on sustainable development in the south-east noted in its final report:
	"Only with significant water efficiency savings in existing and new homes, and the timely provision of new water resources, will there potentially be enough water to meet rising demand for new housing and domestic consumption."
	Flooding is the third issue. It is now nearly six years since devastating floods affected 10,000 people at the cost of £10 billion. According to the Environment Agency, 5 million people in 2 million properties are already at risk of flooding. More than 40 per cent. of people are unaware of the threat and 30 per cent. do not have adequate insurance cover. One of the worst towns affected in the flooding of October 2000 was Uckfield in my constituency. Nearly six years on, no money has been spent on new flood defences. We have had pledges, a reception at Downing street, ministerial visits, consultants employed and even the drawing up of a model that showed miraculously that if water is poured into it, it comes out somewhere else—but not a single pound on flood defences to prevent a recurrence has been spent. Yet Uckfield is expected to accommodate hundreds more houses over the next few years, with more concrete and more drains putting more water in the self-same rivers.
	Despite planning guidance directing development away from areas at risk of flooding, inappropriate development is still occurring. Data from the Environment Agency for 2004 shows that 34,000 new homes are envisaged within the indicative flood plains in local plans and that in the south-east growth areas, 30 per cent. of development sites planned for 2016 to 2031 will be in flood-risk areas. That is yet another aspect that has not been assessed and addressed.
	Fourthly, there is transport. The total transport infrastructure in the south-east is estimated to be £21.3 billion. Increases in traffic congestion and pollution are cited by residents in the south-east as their two top local priorities, but there is no sign of significant improvement. There has been a legacy of underspending on transport in Britain and further public spending will be tighter in the coming years. By 2010, road traffic is expected to increase by 23 to 29 per cent. in England and by more than 25 per cent. in the south-east compared with 2000.
	There is specific evidence to show that congestion in the south-east acts as a brake on new development. For example, a total of 13 junction improvements on the M1, the M11, the M20, the M3, the M27 and A3(M) are necessary for proposed developments. However, those improvements are subject to highways authority holding objections. The A2 outside Dover is now the only stretch of single carriageway main route between Carlisle and Italy. East Sussex has no motorway and there are only 12 miles of dual carriageway in the county. Vital improvements in dualling the A27 along the south coast have been abandoned or put on hold.
	On top of that, there is the problem of maintenance backlogs. The average county council has an estimated £200 million to £300 million worth of maintenance work to do to bring highways up to a satisfactory standard by 2026, but poor financial settlements mean that the necessary work cannot be done.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has continually highlighted the traffic problems around East Grinstead. I was born in East Grinstead and a bypass was being discussed even then. Indeed, it has been talked about since the 1920s. Although the town's population has doubled in my lifetime, the A22 through the town remains a disaster. I support my hon. Friends the Members for Mid-Sussex and for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) in saying that the town cannot take more houses without improvements in the road, and that any solution must also be a solution for the surrounding communities, such as Forest Row in my constituency and the villages in East Surrey.
	Let us consider rail. Concerns about overcrowding, especially on commuter trains in the south-east, constitute the most common complaint that the Office of Rail Regulation receives. Although some improvements have been made, 4 per cent. of rail passengers into London in 2004-05 were still without a seat. That figure will increase further with additional house building. Along with the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), I have been working with the county council to examine the case for reopening the Uckfield-Lewes rail link, which would not only provide an improved local service but open up a strategic new link to the south coast. Despite thousands of new houses being imposed on us, the Government will not put one penny piece into that key infrastructure project.
	The message could not be clearer. The Government expect the south-east to bear all the pain of the new houses but none of the gain of improved infrastructure. If we could prevent the unwanted new houses being built, we would love to do that because they will destroy areas of remarkable beauty for ever. However, the Bill is not about that. If the Government are determined to impose such huge numbers of new houses, against the wishes of local people, the least they can do is establish the investment that is needed in the infrastructure to accommodate them, and the Bill provides for that.
	The measure requires local planning authorities to consult a range of authorities: the health authority to ensure that GP and hospital services can meet the additional demand; the relevant water companies and providers of sewerage and waste services to ensure that they can meet the additional demand; the education authority to ensure that local schools have adequate capacity; and the highways authority and Network Rail to ensure that there is capacity on the road and rail networks.
	The Bill is eminently sensible and commands great support in areas that face the greatest housing pressure. It is an urgent measure and I hope that it will be given time to proceed today. I urge hon. Members to support it.

Mike Gapes: My situation is similar to that of the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) in that there is a lot of new build in my local authority area. However, my constituency is urban and we have a lot of new build because we are surrounded by the green belt, which acts as a straitjacket on all the open spaces in the London borough of Redbridge, to such an extent that, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in the population in my borough, especially in my constituency. The Conservative council in Redbridge has given planning permission for 33-storey and 21-storey tower blocks, and many additional housing units are being built.
	My electorate, which was 78,000 at the election, will increase to about 82,000 in the next three or four years and will probably reach 90,000 10 years from now. I therefore face considerable pressure. Problems involving changes of circumstances and a lack of facilities apply equally in urban areas, with one exception—the beautiful Valentines park, where Essex used to play their cricket.
	We had a problem with finding additional school places, but a long campaign was run over many years by a local residents association against the development of a former sports field for a new primary school. The council has just compulsorily purchased that sports field to build the new school. In fact, we are having two new primary schools built. However, we will also need a new secondary school in the near future, and I have absolutely no idea where the land for that will be found. Our existing schools are all full, and I regularly see constituents in my surgery who are being told that they must take their children to schools in the north of the borough, four or five miles away, where there are places, because there is none in the south of the borough.
	We all face such problems due to rapid population change. I would like to point out to the hon. Member for Wealden that it is predicted that the population in England will increase from 50.1 million in 2004 to 55.8 million in 2026. That is an increase of 11 per cent., or 5.7 million people. London's population is now increasing after years of decline, and it will continue to increase because of London's success as a global city and the great success of the economic policies of this Government.
	We face a real problem, however. There is insufficient land in London to provide housing for all the people who are already in desperate housing need, including those in the London borough of Redbridge and other boroughs who are in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. I have constituents who have been placed in my borough by Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham councils because they cannot find housing for them in their own boroughs. For several years, my council was placing people in guest houses in Southend-on-Sea out of season in order to deal with the emergency housing needs of so many homeless people.
	We need new housing. We need the new housing in the Thames Gateway, but we also need it in other areas. The hon. Gentleman's speech was a little like the curate's egg: parts of it were good, and parts were very bad. The bad parts illustrated to me that the Bill is not all that it seems, and that it represents a very sophisticated form of nimbyism. It is saying, "We want to carry out an audit, and when we find that the facilities are not there, we will stop the houses being built in our area."
	People in urban centres such as my constituency do not live in a green and pleasant land. We have the dark, satanic mills—except that they are no longer mills but rows and rows of houses, because manufacturing industry has gone and the landscape has been transformed. Nevertheless, we do not have the same green and pleasant areas that the hon. Gentleman's constituency has, yet the building will go on in our areas rather than elsewhere in the region. I suspect that many of the people who live in his constituency get on the train and come into London to work, earn their nice salaries from working in our capital city and go back to their homes and enjoy their environment.
	Many of my constituents suffer as a result of the lack of space and the congestion caused by the growth of the city, but we have to recognise that nimbyism is a threat to the vast majority of people living in urban areas. Someone must speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves, and do not have sophisticated pressure groups and campaigns to preserve this or stop that. Although the hon. Gentleman made a number of valid points, he also made a number of sophisticated nimbyist points.
	As the hon. Gentleman will know, the Government have conducted various surveys to forecast the number of homes that will be needed for our growing population. An inevitable consequence of changes in lifestyle and the ageing population is the fact that we have more and more single households. Between now and 2026, the number of households will grow by 209,000 a year, and 72 per cent. of them will be single-person households. But we are not delivering 209,000 homes a year; in 2004-05, the most recent year for which we have statistics, we delivered only two thirds of that number—168,000. There is a gap.
	People are having to live in overcrowded accommodation, with friends or relatives or in temporary accommodation because they cannot obtain the housing that they need. The private rented market has not provided enough homes to meet the social needs of people in all categories. We therefore need social housing, and a mechanism to ensure that it is provided throughout the country, not just in certain areas. That necessitates a proactive approach from central Government, consulting and, I hope, in co-operation with local authorities. In London we have a Mayor with planning powers, and what he does is very important, but we need a national strategy. The brunt should not be borne by those of us who live in urban areas, or in new areas such as the Thames Gateway.
	We can do some valuable things. Yesterday I spoke at a public meeting organised by Friends of the Earth in the neighbouring constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge). She and I were both on the platform. A representative of Barking council talked about the borough's interesting plans to deal with the huge increase in its population as part of the Thames Gateway development. There will be about 140,000 new homes, or housing units, in the Thames Gateway. Many of the homes in Barking will be built at a higher level than the town centre. The hon. Gentleman talked about flood plains. Although these homes are being built on a flood plain, they will be in less danger of flooding than the existing ones.
	The new housing will enable us to do something about climate change. We can introduce solar panels, and district heating schemes. We can use the surplus water from power stations: when the water has cooled them, it can be used for district heating schemes. Enormous gains can be made from modern, technological housing development. We do not all benefit from living in areas containing 17th-century and 18th-century cottages; any that existed in Ilford have long gone. In the 17th and 18th centuries Ilford was just a little hamlet, an adjunct to Barking, where the abbey was. The only buildings of any great age in my constituency are the hospital chapel, a fantastic building that dates back to the 11th and 12th centuries, and Valentine's mansion, which dates back to the end of the 17th century. My constituency, like many others, only had a few thousand people 120 years ago, and then the railway came. As a result, my borough has a quarter of a million people. Further growth and urbanisation of London followed as the suburbs linked together, and we ended up with a global city.
	Change is inevitable, and we need to manage that change. Last December, in response to the Barker review of housing supply, the Government published several documents, including a consultation document on the planning gain supplement, which contained several interesting proposals, including modifications to section 106. That also raised the issue of whether it is right that people derive private benefit from huge increases in the value of their land and in their ability to make money, effectively at the public expense, while a mechanism is not provided for the public to benefit in return. The community, not just the private interest that is fortunate enough to own land in an area of development, needs to benefit.
	The Government's response in December 2005 set out a commitment to provide more homes for future generations and an ambitious package of measures to help people into home ownership and to increase social housing, which is vital. When I was young, I lived in a council house—

Meg Munn: You still are young.

Mike Gapes: I thank my hon. Friend. Everything is relative. She is younger than me, but we will not go into that.
	When I was younger than I am now, many years ago, the area where I was growing up, Hainault, in the Ilford, North constituency, had a large body of social housing. There was as huge estate. Since the 1970s, almost all the houses have been sold. Compensatory social housing has not been built in the London borough of Redbridge. Since the Labour council of a few years in the 1990s, a policy of housing association developments has been in place, but the total number of social housing units is only a few thousand.
	Every week at my advice surgery, people complain about shortages of housing. They say that they bid for a property under the Choice scheme, with a glossy booklet produced by the east London councils. After checking, we find that there were 250 bids, and that the constituent is, say, number 37 or 64 on the list. The constituent says, "What is the point of bidding?" We contact the council, and the council officers issue a standard letter—I know what it will say before I read it—that there is a scheme, people can bid and the constituent is entitled to do so. That is it, unless, there is some overriding medical need.
	I have quite a lot of large families in my constituency, and I was told that, apart from new build, only about four or five local authority or housing association properties with four bedrooms become available in the borough every year. There might be 40 families with overriding medical needs, yet they will not get one of those properties. We need new housing to meet those social needs and we cannot allow selfish nimbyism in certain areas to prevent the majority of people from accessing the housing that they require. Not everybody has the ability or resources to purchase a property. We therefore need mixed tenure—joint ownership, shared equity and so on. Above all, we need to build properties for people to live in, and we need them in areas where we have the land, access and communication.
	We also need sometimes to create new communities. The hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) referred in error in his interesting speech to Essex and motorways. My constituency has the Redbridge roundabout, which is the second most polluted area for particulates in the air, according to the  Evening Standard survey two years ago—

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could relate his comments to the Bill, which is quite wide ranging.

Lyn Brown: Does my hon. Friend agree that Thames Water's record is truly disgraceful? Would it not be abhorrent to our constituents if that private sector company's record stopped them from getting the homes built that they desperately need?

Mike Gapes: The planning system has an important role to play in ensuring that the housing market is flexible and responsive to these needs and that we can provide homes for all the people in all our communities, including those who are trapped and paying extortionate private rents. Some people become trapped in other ways. A couple might move into a social housing property when they had no children, or one child, and then expand their family so that they end up with three or four children but are then unable to find a property in their area within their price range, become subject to the whims of the housing association, and cannot find a property to transfer to near to where the children are at school. That is dilemma that I hear about regularly.

Mike Gapes: I agree. I therefore welcome the various initiatives recently introduced by the Government. They are not sufficient, but at least they are a step in the right direction. I also welcome the issuing of the code for sustainable homes, on which there was a consultation that ended in March. That code is to be strengthened to improve the environmental sustainability of homes so that when people move to a new home it is not of poor quality but subject to a high standards. The Government are going to revise the code to ensure that energy efficiency ratings are made mandatory for new and existing homes. That will help poorer people because it will reduce their fuel bills. There will also be minimum standards of water efficiency and measures to ensure that builders and people in the building trade must have the highest standards and not engage in jerry-building and competing on the basis of low quality.
	Many things can be done to ensure that we meet the needs of our communities. We must consider energy and micro-technology. Wind turbines, which are popular, should be put not only on the houses of people with lots of money in the countryside but on those of people in cities where that is sensible and sustainable.

Nicholas Soames: It may not be generally known in the House of Commons that at the Conservative party parliamentary away-day, I won one of the chameleon awards for the biggest contribution to environmental affairs for my extensive role in nature conservation work. I say that because listening to the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) is, for me, something like a near-death experience, and when I was wondering why, I remembered that gapes is a fatal disease in grouse.
	I realise that the hon. Gentleman's role today is to act as a logjam, but I have seldom heard more nonsense talked, even on a Friday, about a serious Bill, of which my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) is the promoter and I am pleased to be a sponsor. The Bill was admirably and expertly introduced by my good Friend and parliamentary neighbour the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) who, together with me and many other local Members of Parliament, is involved in a campaign that could not be further from the vices attributed to us by the hon. Member for Ilford, South. Indeed, it will be the answer that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) uses, if and when she has a moment to speak.
	A number of us—my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham, and my hon. Friends the Members for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) and for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and the chief executives and leaders of the district councils—went to see the Minister for Housing and Planning to talk about the problems associated with infrastructure and housing targets. We explained that we were not against more housing and understood the need for further and more affordable housing in the south of England, but she accused us of being nimbys, not wanting the housing and so on.
	May I lay to rest the suggestion that the Bill is a plot to stop the building of more housing? It is a plot to prevent the Government from imposing housing targets on areas of the south-east which are already creaking and do not have the infrastructure to cope with the housing that we already have, that which we are going to get and that which will be imposed on us in the future. Let us dispel the impression created by the 50 minutes of drivel from the hon. Member for Ilford, South and return to a first class Bill that is trying to do something very important—that is, to secure the quality of life for people of all backgrounds and all walks of life.
	The picture portrayed by the hon. Gentleman of some downtrodden urban minority struggling in the inner cities, as opposed to people who spend their entire lives in traffic jams, is pathetic. I agree that the problem is a national problem. It cannot simply be looked at locally. The Bill is a serious attempt to devise a national procedure for an audit of the infrastructure, so that what his Government have always promised can, unusually, be made true, and infrastructure will keep pace with housing development.
	I first raised this question years ago. In 2000 I went to see the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), who was then a Minister at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and is now the Prime Minister's admirable Parliamentary Private Secretary, to discuss the real problems caused by the creaking infrastructure in my constituency and other constituencies such as Wealden, East Surrey and Horsham—the places that we know best, which are struggling to cope with further housing. At that time, I participated in serious discussions about the infrastructure deficit.
	My hon. Friends the Members for Arundel and South Downs, for Chichester and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) all wanted to be here today, but they are attending meetings to try to save some of the most important assets in the health service in the south of England, St. Richard's hospital in Chichester and Worthing hospital, which are in danger of being downgraded. That illustrates the vital importance of health infrastructure, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden has mentioned.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden was generous in his comments about the campaign that we have fought in Mid-Sussex to preserve vital services at the Princess Royal hospital in Haywards Heath and the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead, which is particularly well known to him. Incidentally, the Government have not even consulted the health service on major housing targets. No one has bothered to consult the NHS on plans for the future. If anyone had, the strategic health authority in my area would not be starting another consultation, which will lead to further recommendations to cut services.
	I want to relate the Bill to one particular problem in my constituency. We must provide about 14,100 homes in Mid-Sussex between 2006 and 2026. The plan is to build some 2,500 of those homes on a greenfield site in the beautiful town of East Grinstead in addition to a further 2,000 homes in the town, making a total of up to 4,600 houses in one small market town, which is out of all sense of scale and proportion. The plan has been subject to a planning consultation, which has just ended, in which it attracted almost universal objection from local residents, who are extremely anxious. I anticipate that the result of the consultation will be a strong no to what the council has had foisted on it and is having to propose.
	As I have said, the plan would result in about 4,500 new houses in East Grinstead alone, which would result in a new population of more than 11,000—3,000 extra schoolchildren, 1,600 extra school places, 1,500 pensioners, a requirement for 5,000 jobs, 2,000 extra commuters and 6,000 extra cars on the road. To put the matter in context, that development does not include a single penny of Government funding for infrastructure to maintain my constituents' quality of life under such a huge weight of development.
	The Minister may have heard of the Gatwick diamond, which is an economic zone. There is a proposal to build 41,200 houses between 2006 and 2026 in the Gatwick diamond, which is more than 2,000 houses a year. That level of activity is almost twice that of Ashford and similar to that of Milton Keynes. Both Ashford and Milton Keynes receive enormous public support and help for building infrastructure to keep pace with the development of homes. No help at all is available in Mid-Sussex from the Government. At present, the infrastructure charge per house is likely to be about £46,000. How will that help affordable housing? How will people be able to afford house prices that will sustain such an infrastructure spend?
	Another consideration is water. A distinguished environmentalist who sits on the Labour Benches said to me yesterday, "There are 14 million people in the south of England at present living under a hosepipe ban. A massive increase in housing development is proposed. Where do the Government expect the water to come from?" How can this be called sustainable development?

Barbara Keeley: The Bill is concerned with the tension between two groups in our local communities that has been reflected in the past two speeches that we have heard. The first group are those who need homes, but find that they cannot get them because of a substantial housing shortfall, especially in urban areas. The second group are those who are living in areas in which they do not want further and more intensive development. It is difficult to balance those two groups' concerns, and that is something of which I have experience.
	When I served as an elected member on the Trafford local authority in the north-west, I represented a town-centre ward for nine years. That part of Trafford is a desirable area with good schools, so it was a target for housing development. Most of the substantial planning applications resulted in a large volume of objections from local residents, and a key part of my work as an elected member was dealing with them. However, at the same time, we had a shortage of homes in the area. The situation was difficult for couples, families and young people who wanted to get their first independent accommodation and move out of their parents' home.
	We know that the number of households has increased by 30 per cent. over the past 30 years. We clearly have an ageing population because people are living longer. However, we must balance other key factors when we consider the mix of housing that we need. There are now more lone-parent households. Most elected representatives, especially those in local government, will find that they are continually dealing with couples who have split up, both of whom want accommodation in which their children can live for part of the time, which also increases the numbers of houses that we need.
	It is predicted that the population will have grown by 11 per cent., or 5.7 million people, by 2026. The number of households is increasing by 209,000 a year, of which 72 per cent. will be single-person households, which is a key point. However, there is a gap, because we are building only 168,000 extra homes a year. We must acknowledge that there is thus a shortfall in housing. The Government's ambition in response to the Barker review is to increase the supply of new homes to 200,000 a year by 2016. Of course, it is also recognised that new homes must be in sustainable communities.
	Planning guidance has been changing since I served in local government. The main guidance for planning policy on housing was set out in planning policy guidance note 3, which was published in 2000. PPG3 became a well-known acronym in local government. However, I understand that it will be replaced later this year by planning policy statement 3. The main difference seems to be a move away from the simple predict-and-provide approach to housing towards one of planning, monitoring and managing. We need such an approach on planning, so the choice is to be applauded.
	The local housing market has not responded to local need, and it is no exaggeration to say that the shortage of housing causes absolute misery in communities. We want residents to be able to get their first step on the housing ladder. People often want to take that first step in the area in which they grew up, where their family and friends are. However, my experience shows that areas often become overheated. In the town centre that I represented, small, new apartments that were built were put on the market for about £200,000, which was way above what a young person or couple in that area could afford.
	The planning system has a role to play in improving the responsiveness and flexibility of the housing market because everything that I saw suggested that if the housing market was left to its own devices, it would not meet all needs. So we need affordable units of starter accommodation for couples and young people and in other areas we need affordable family homes. We also need much more accommodation for older people. The area I represented had the largest concentration of older people anywhere in the borough. Some of it—sheltered housing, for example—was very good, but nowhere near enough of that type of housing was available to support the many people growing older and frailer.
	The Bill may prevent the development of sufficient accommodation for older people's needs, which is one of my main concerns about it. We are considering what we need in sustainable communities, but I feel that the needs of older people merit much more consideration.
	A constituent told me about one of his friends who had grown older and whose wife had died. His standards declined and he even failed to wash or keep up at all with how he looked. He simply could not keep up the maintenance of his home, which was burgled, so he became fearful and his health went into even further decline. My constituent, speaking on behalf of his friend, asked whether there was a service to help with the very difficult move from his lifelong home. The man was living in the place he had shared with his wife and he needed to move somewhere warm and secure that would be more suitable for him as he got older. I faced the difficulty that local government did not really have such a service at that time, when the housing market just produced what the housing market produced and there was nobody around to help that person with the move.
	At that time, the sort of help that the man required did not exist, but I believe that it is more available now because we have sheltered housing with wardens and even a move to extra care in housing, so that people can remain in their own homes and receive the sort of care that was previously available only in nursing homes. That is the mix of housing needed in most areas. Having suitable and sufficient accommodation for older people and a change in the type of accommodation as people grow older is increasingly becoming a problem. It has started to be recognised, but we need to pay much more attention to it.
	I have spoken about the mix of houses needed in most areas. Without the appropriate mix of accommodation to meet the needs of older people, their health can rapidly decline, so we really need the right mix. We also need a mix of measures to make new houses sustainable, to make them energy efficient and efficient in the use of water in the kitchen and bathroom, which the last two speakers mentioned. Improved fittings and appliances can help. The bigger issue is that water companies must address the level of leaks, but that matter is probably outside the scope of today's debate.
	I understand that there is to be a strengthened code for sustainable homes, which will ensure that new homes are efficient in energy and water. That is important not just for the environment, because as the code suggests, householders need better information about the running costs of their homes. There is now a virtuous circle: using less water and energy is the aim, but it entails saving money on utility bills, which most people want. I believe that the strengthened code will incorporate that.
	In growth areas such as health and education, I understand that the Government are ensuring that the main public expenditure programmes are flexible and responsive to growing communities. In my constituency, education presents the opposite problem to securing adequate supply because we have falling rolls. Schools across my constituency, particularly primary schools, are having to contemplate school mergers because not enough children are being born in our communities. Having a better housing mix, particularly more family homes in some areas, would help to ensure the continuing viability of our schools. It is not only a question of there being too few homes, because in some areas it is the type of home that unsuitable.
	I want to return to health planning, which the Bill touches on and we discussed in today's earlier debate. For me, health planning, as I mentioned in an intervention earlier today, is not about saving small hospitals. The key point about hospitals in respect of what communities need as more houses are built is that they should provide safe and effective services. A difficult tension is developing. There is a tendency for hon. Members of all parties to argue for "save the local hospital" campaigns when we should campaign for safe and effective services for our constituents. We need hospitals with appropriate neo-natal and paediatric services. Those are often highly specialised units and it is not possible for them to be available in every hospital. We need suitable diagnostics, and every hospital should have an MRI scanner and the other sorts of scanner that are needed for care and treatment.
	All the discussions that I have held with NHS professionals suggest that we need hospitals of a sufficient size to provide the right number of staff with expertise, especially consultants. When I was in local government, we had a long-running battle to try to hang on to our district general hospital but, as we discussed the matter with NHS professionals, we began to realise that there was problem with the number of consultants that a hospital of that size could sustain. We discussed whether it was safe, whether there would be a proper career path and whether we would get the right and best people for our hospital. Those matters are important, too.
	Not just anybody can diagnose cancer. It requires expertise, and operations and treatment should be conducted by those who are experienced and can manage to perform the required number of operations every year. Health planning must therefore be linked to more effective community and primary care services. That is beginning to develop in a—dare I say it?—healthy way in my area.
	In the Leigh area, there is an admirable walk-in centre, which also serves my constituency. A new primary care centre is about to be built in Walkden in the centre of my constituency. The new local improvement finance trust—LIFT—centre will include GP services, a clinic that offers physiotherapy, rehabilitation, audiology and a children's clinic. It is vital to my community for all those service to come together so that, for example, an older person who has had a stroke will not have to travel to Hope hospital some distance away, or to Bolton or Wigan, but can get the rehabilitation treatment and physiotherapy locally. That also means that family members could accompany the person more easily.
	Transport, which the Bill describes as condition 6, has been mentioned in the debate. The measure would provide for
	"sufficient capacity on the existing road network... to sustain any increase in... traffic that is likely to be generated by the proposed development".
	That is peculiar. Most people in local government have been working with the assumption that we should encourage people to use public transport. In my area of the north-west, that means the Metrolink tram. A guided busway from Leigh to Manchester will soon be added to that. The tram has led to people switching from private to public transport and lessening road use. As with the tube in London, people find that the tram is a good mode of public transport.
	Transport is another weak aspect of the Bill because we should not simply cater for an increasing amount of traffic. The assumption in planning is to encourage the use of public transport. To go by the staff who work in my constituency office, we cannot assume that younger people will drive to work. We should encourage them to use public transport. The Bill does not cover that and is therefore deficient.
	I understand the competing issues that affect planning and I have several years' experience of dealing with residents who are concerned about new housing developments. Such concerns are still expressed to me as a Member of Parliament, and that happens to many other hon. Members, too. However, people in all age groups are affected by the problem of not finding a home suitable for their needs. In my constituency, that means young people, including couples, families and older people. If the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) does not believe the amount of homelessness that exists—some of his comments implied that he did not—I suggest that he attend the surgery of one my hon. Friends with a London constituency.

Barbara Keeley: I was just about to refer the effect of overcrowding at the end of someone's life, in that people cannot be discharged from hospital to die at home, even if that is their wish, if their home is overcrowded. Those who propose measures such as those in the Bill that would reduce or restrain housing development should take overcrowding into account. It is the biggest driving factor in these issues, and we cannot have that.
	We must provide the homes that our communities need, in terms of the mix of housing that I have mentioned, and of the energy and water efficiency measures. I welcome the fact that the Government have changed their planning approach, through planning and policy statement 3, from the plan, monitor and manage approach to a plan-led approach that will allocate land for housing and then assess the capacity of existing and planned social and transport infrastructures.
	The Bill applies to the construction of more than 150 houses or flats by the same developer on a single site, or on contiguous sites, within a period of five years. I do not think that that aspect of the Bill really helps.
	As I said earlier, I have had experience of a housing hot spot. Developers there were keen to build expensive apartments in quite small numbers. They would buy a plot containing one or two large properties, of which there were many in the town-centre ward that I represented, then build 10 or 15 expensive luxury apartments. They would repeat the process on many sites. Housing change of that kind caused a number of problems in itself. When we speak of audits, or of planning that will affect only areas containing at least 150 houses, we ignore the fact that a community can be significantly affected by small numbers of units.
	As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South, those who build small developments consisting of 10 or 15 luxury apartments can avoid the requirement to provide affordable homes. We found again and again that it was the small developments that did not provide such homes. Some of the larger developments of flats or houses—the few that we had—were more likely to provide them. I think that local authorities could do more to ensure that some mid-scale housing developments supplied affordable housing, to the benefit of the community.
	I believe that the plan-led approach of PPS3 can ensure that local authorities provide homes, and that sustainable communities and homes are developed.

Richard Younger-Ross: There is some element of that, and I have looked at some regional spatial strategies. In relation to district councils and more local problems, I have not seen that approach. I will be interested to see how the provision works its way through, and whether it ultimately delivers anything.
	There are some other difficulties relating to predictions and auditing. The hon. Member for Wealden referred to auditing in relation to hospitals, and gave some figures on growth of hospital need. That is a difficult calculation, because it depends on what basis is used. Were we to take a crude figure of 400 bed spaces in the local hospital, we could say that a doubling of the population would necessitate 800 bed spaces in 10 years' time. That does not quite follow, however, because we must take account of the changes in hospital care. With micro-surgery, keyhole surgery and other techniques, more people are being kept in hospital for shorter periods. Therefore, even were the population to double over a period, the number of bed spaces needed might be only 600, not 800—an increase, but not a doubling.
	I therefore have some reservations about the crudity with which the Bill operates at some levels, which might cause some difficulty. That does not mean, however, that it is not worthy of debating in Committee. One good reason it is worthy of such debate is that it would show the paucity of some of the Government's action in the past.
	The hon. Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) mentioned the definition of "significant". I hope that I have pronounced her constituency name correctly, as Members are always mispronouncing my constituency's name—it was mispronounced earlier. The Bill refers to 150 houses as "significant". My background is in architecture, and one does not have to be bright to work out that if "significant" is 150 houses, a developer looking to build 300 houses would build 298. He would build 149 now, which he would get through without the additional burden. A couple of years later, as he had land-banked the land—given the size of the development, one does not build 300 houses in one go anyway—he would put in another application for a further 149 houses. He would therefore get round that definition a second time. That difficulty and failure would need to be addressed, but that does not mean that it is not an important thing that should be tackled.
	My constituency is beautiful—from Widecombe in the Moor, across lots of Dartmoor, to rural coastal towns. The building of 150 houses in Widecombe in the Moor would be devastating. Developers would never get consent from the national park authority anyway, but the principle of the argument is that far fewer houses would be significant in such areas in their impact on doctors' surgeries, on roads—the roads are narrow and Devon banks are very high—and on other parts of the infrastructure. A far more flexible approach would be required.
	I come to the next stage of the problem in how we deal with the planning process. Part of the difficulty is that many of the services have been privatised. By their nature, such services will respond only once there is a market. Therefore, water companies will by and large look at resolving the problem after demand has been created. In some cases they do not even do that, which is why Thames Water is getting itself into hot water, as it were. We have to find a way—special planning begins the process—to get the infrastructure in place before construction or at the same time.
	That cuts across—without digressing too far—much Government thinking in other areas. Very often, funds from the closure of a care home, for instance, will be used for another facility, but the care home is closed before the funds are made available and the other facility is not provided for two years. Exactly the same applies in planning. We cannot leave a gap of two years between the creation of the need and the construction of the road, the extra water supply, hospital or school.
	The hon. Member for Wealden criticised the Government's proposal to change section 106 agreements. Let us be clear, section 106 agreements are a form of bribery. A developer comes along and says, "Right, I want to build 150 houses. What do you want—a new school, a new link road?" That is how it works. Small parishes might really want a new school and somebody might come along and say, "I know that you really don't want 150 houses; you only want about 50. But you allow us to build 150 and we'll build you a new school." That is the reality in this country and that is why getting rid of 106 agreements is an exceedingly good idea.
	I have reservations, too. The idea that the funding will go into a pot and move out of the local authority is deeply worrying. I would like to be assured that there is some way of getting that money back into the community to pay for infrastructure. I am somewhere between the two: I am not convinced of the Government's proposal, but I know that the way in which 106 agreements work at the moment is deeply flawed.

David Anderson: As an MP from the north-east of England, I wish that we had some of the problems that have been identified in the south-east—too much work, too many people wanting to live in the area, too much investment. If we had some of those problems, I might share some of the views that have been expressed today.
	I live in a village that was the epitome of a sustainable community. It was a mining community that was first developed in the early 1820s, when a local colliery was sunk. They started building houses in 1832: the houses were part and parcel of the job of the miners and remained so for the next 150 years, becoming part of the village scene. Not only were there houses that working people lived in, but the miners union developed houses for retired miners who had been thrown out on the streets when they finished working so that they could remain in the community. The people developed parks, sanatoriums, welfare systems, football fields, cricket clubs and brass bands. It was the epitome of a sustainable economy—sorry, a sustainable community; it was anything but a sustainable economy.
	Unfortunately, everything changed when the Thatcher Government, in their wisdom, decided that it was a good idea to do away with this country's indigenous coal industry. As a direct consequence, they destroyed thousands of homes and hundreds of communities throughout the country—homes that were valuable to the people who lived in them but that, unfortunately, had no real value on the property market. They were in areas where there was no work and people had no interest in moving there; they continued to be lived in by people who could not afford to move out because the houses had no market value. Eventually people did move out, or elderly people moved into homes or, sadly, died in their home, and the local authorities brought in people that they could not house elsewhere. That led to a spiral of despair: drugs, burglary, petty crime and violence sucked the life out of the communities.
	Now, houses are being pulled down and we need new ones. We need new houses in a way that we have not needed them before. We do not need restrictions or any form of nimbyism to prevent the development that we need. We want high-quality, environmentally sound houses that our young people can afford to buy and live in. We do not want obstacles such as the ones that we faced when we were younger put in the way of positive, quality developments for the people of the future.
	We in the north-east do not have some of the other problems that have been identified today. We have a plentiful water supply, mainly because we developed resources such as the Kielder reservoir. It was created to help the steel industry and the coal industry in the north-east, but in the 1980s, the Tory Government decided that they did not want to use British coal to keep the steel industry going; they bought Polish coal instead. As a result, we have a reservoir with underground links to three main rivers, but the water is not needed except for public consumption. We do not have the problem that affects the south-east, so why should we in the north-east be subjected to the limitations that the Bill would impose?
	We do need infrastructure development. We need investment in new roads, we need our railways infrastructure to be built up and we need more and better housing. We are seeing quality development in houses and businesses across the north-east, but we want more. Obstacles are being thrown up in certain areas, with people saying that they do not want building in their area because they think that they have enough. That is nimbyism and it is not helpful. What my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) said was nimbyism, clearly is. It may be a sophisticated term and I am not the man to ask about sophistication, but it is clear that, if the Bill goes through as it stands, we will have a situation in which a private company can say, "We aren't satisfied that we can deliver in the way that you are asking us to." To me, that is a built-in veto.
	If private companies such as Thames Water cannot produce enough water for the people of the area to use, why should we allow them to dictate the system and stop development? I have just moved into this area. I have bought a flat in Wandsworth common. I am told that I need to go carefully with my water. I am paying for it, so why should I go carefully with it? Twenty years ago, those people were allowed to take control of our public water supply—helped by investment from the Government. We were told that part of the deal—the reason we were giving control to the private companies—was that those people would develop the infrastructure, look after us and make sure that we had water, without any problems. That is not the case.
	What is Thames Water doing to improve my water supply? Is it fixing the leaks? Is it employing mechanics and engineers to dig the roads up and put the leaks right? It has put adverts in the newspapers and on billboards to say, "This is how much more water we will provide for the next 10 years." There are adverts featuring Battersea power station and other buildings in London. Those adverts say, "This is how much water we will save." Instead of talking about it, Thames Water should get on with it. It has had 20 years to get on with it and unfortunately it has not succeeded.
	It is clear that one of the drives behind water privatisation was that promise and that promise is not being delivered. Why, then, should we allow those people to say to us, "We aren't satisfied that we can deliver. Therefore we will block what has been suggested." Those involved in running the sewage system can do the same, as can the Environment Agency and the people who get rid of our waste. In the area where I live, there are massive issues about waste disposal. There are already big planning arguments involving companies such as Sita which have long-standing contracts in our area to fill up old quarries and mine shafts. They are having massive planning arguments under present legislation. Why should we give them another veto so that they can say, "We are not satisfied, therefore this cannot go forward."? That is not right or proper. That may not be the intention of the Bill, but I am convinced that it is how some people will use it.
	The difference between what happens now and what is proposed is that, at present, any developer has to consult certain bodies. It has to say to people who provide waste systems, sewerage, water and power, "Can you deliver for us?" and they can say yea or nay. What they cannot do, and what the Bill will mean they can do, is say, "We aren't satisfied we can do it, therefore you can't move forward." That is what we will end up with. Lectures from the Conservatives, who sold off social housing and then refused to build more houses to replace it, do not in any way enamour me of taking lessons from them on providing sustainable communities and decent-quality affordable housing for our young people. That is what this is about.

David Anderson: No, I will not, because you would not give way to me.
	One of the questions that the hon. Gentleman raised was, how can we save water? Well, we could say to some of the millionaires in the south-east, "Why don't you turn your swimming pool into a sandpit?" That could go a long way towards saving some of the water that we need. The clear intention in the Bill is nimbyism. The intention is to stop things moving forward and to block the development of quality housing in a particular area. That will have a massive impact on the rest of the country and that should not be allowed.

Hon. Members: Object.
	 To be read a Second time on Monday 17 October.

Stewart Jackson: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me the opportunity to raise an urgent and pressing matter on behalf of my constituents.
	Peterborough has an excellent record of harmonious community relations, having evolved from a relatively small cathedral city of about 48,000 citizens after the second world war with an economy based on engineering, the railways and agriculture, to a diverse cosmopolitan city of about 160,000 people, according to the 2001 census. Although manufacturing has declined, service industries such as insurance and finance, retailing, transportation, warehousing and distribution have expanded significantly since 1991. Recently, the city has been an urban hub for agriculture and food processing.
	The decency and tolerance of local people are marked by their willingness to welcome newcomers over the years: refugees from poverty and oppression, such as the Italian community to work on the Fletton brickworks after the war, Irish immigrants to work on the railways, and Pakistanis and especially Kashmiris in the 1960s and early 1970s. The latter are now third generation Peterborians and they contribute hugely to the business and civic life of the city of Peterborough.
	Although the Pakistani community could be said by some to be socially insular, we have rarely seen the social antagonism, resentment and communal violence witnessed in other cities and towns in England, such as Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, between the white working class and Asian youth. Indeed, the Pakistani community is well led and moderate in its political outlook. It is proud of its historical heritage, well educated and politically engaged and values its hard won place as an integral part of the host community.
	For instance, Pakistani residents make up 60 per cent. of the population of the Central ward. Across the whole of the unitary authority area, the non-white population is over 10 per cent. It is appropriate to add that the city also contains three wards in the bottom 250 most deprived wards in England—Central, Dogsthorpe and East wards—and has a male life expectancy four years lower than that of Cambridge, as well as higher rates for infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, heart disease and strokes than the eastern region and England and Wales as a whole.
	A series of events began in the 1997 Parliament that has jeopardised Peterborough's enviable record as an exemplar of middle England accepting and embracing change for the common good. In 2000, Peterborough was designated a dispersal centre by the Home Office and the National Asylum Support Service. It was decreed without any proper consultation with the people of Peterborough or their elected representatives that the city should receive 80 per cent. of all the asylum seekers and their families dispersed to the eastern region. Despite efforts by officers of the city council, elected Members and others, including my predecessor in the House, the actual number of asylum seekers in Peterborough was never quantified and was the subject of Government obfuscation, with the frequent citing of commercially sensitive contracts with private sector housing contractors such as Clearsprings as a pretext to hide the true picture.
	In December 2004, the official figure for the number of asylum seekers in Peterborough was 255, which was still more than the figures for Luton, Norwich and Ipswich. However, sources within Peterborough city council estimated that the figure was much higher—perhaps as high as 4,000. For no discernible reason other than self-interest, the unaccountable and unelected members of the East of England regional assembly colluded with that official deceit, much to their discredit. Other agencies such as the police and local health bodies preferred to take the path of least resistance rather than speaking out, either because of political correctness or because of collective cowardice. Predictably and contemptibly, any attempt to debate the policy in a rational and reasoned way was met with the cry of "Racism" to close down the debate.
	The issues of immigration and asylum, as well as crime, quickly reached the top of the political agenda in the Peterborough constituency, which played a major part in costing the Labour party the parliamentary seat at last year's general election. Many people were affronted by the high-handed decision by central Government and the lack of consultation. That said, there was a consensus across the political spectrum that community cohesion was at risk if the city council and local taxpayers were not financially assisted to deal with assimilation and integration and the burden they were placing on council tax payers. The then Home Office Minister, who is now Secretary of State for Defence, correctly surmising the gravity of the situation, made this pledge in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph on 15 December 2004:
	"The fact of the matter is that any charge asylum seekers place on local authorities, we in Central Government will meet."
	After prolonged lobbying by the city council and other key stakeholders, such as the greater Peterborough primary care partnership and Cambridgeshire constabulary, the Government agreed in November 2004 to fund through the Treasury's invest to save budget the establishment of the new link project, which was set up under the auspices of the city council's asylum and migration service in Lincoln road in the Millfield area of Peterborough. It involved the amalgamation of nine key projects undertaken by seven voluntary and statutory agencies and was designed to help the integration of not only asylum seekers, but refugees and economic migrants. The scheme was awarded £2.2 million over three years to develop key projects in areas such access to information and training, volunteering, citizenship, English language courses, mediation, translation services, setting up community groups and research on new arrivals and cohesion.
	At the outset, I was a sceptic about new link, but I am a pragmatist. My view is that it was necessary to support the work of new link to safeguard the long-term harmony and stability of my constituency and to prevent the resentment and alienation felt justifiably by many of my constituents against Government policy, which, incidentally, resulted in a candidate standing at the general election as "National Front—Britons not Refugees" receiving 931 votes at last year's election.
	I was also impressed by the leadership of the project's manager, Leonie McCarthy, and her team at new link and by the experiences of some of their clients. Leonie has worked hard to make the most of a difficult situation and has steered clear of political controversy, preferring practical action to political posturing.
	Some weeks ago, I was privileged to visit new link and launch the website of the newly established Peterborough African community association, which is a confederation of people from 18 African countries. I met its chairman, Dan Cissikho, an asylum seeker who was originally from Senegal, who is working hard to integrate new African residents in the city as a community leader and using his practical skills, which he obtained while running an IT business in his homeland, in order to help others.
	The local police have also praised the work of new link. In particular, they have pointed out that its ongoing work helps to release scarce police resources, which are decreasing, to concentrate on other major crime problems in the city. In the jargon, new link is defined as "part of the complex Social Cohesion jigsaw" in Peterborough. Its work was recently recognised in the UK housing awards 2005, where it won an award for excellence in promoting community cohesion.
	Do I applaud the Government funding? The answer is yes. Do I think that our work on community cohesion is finished? No, I do not. As we all know, every silver lining has a cloud. I intend to tell the House why I think that two policy decisions taken by this Government, discrete but interrelated, have the potential to destroy all the good work that new link has achieved since November 2004, and potentially to plunge Peterborough into a state of social dislocation and even civil strife, and to create a breeding ground for the emergence of the plausible racist bigots in the shape of the British National party.
	Despite significant evidence that the work undertaken by new link is both valuable and cost-effective—that was its raison d'être—and vital to maintaining community cohesion, the Government intend to end all invest to save funding for the project from March 2007. The Government envisaged across-the-board savings of £5 million on its £2.2 million investment. There is the important work in areas such as community development, training, learning, information and assistance. If that work is to continue, most of the burden will thereafter fall on the hard-pressed city council tax payers. A sum of certainly £1 million will be necessary to keep the work going.
	Despite tabling half a dozen parliamentary written questions to Ministers over the past 12 months, I have yet to receive even the basic rationale for this short-sighted decision, which effectively will terminate one of the most successful projects of its sort in the UK. The Government seem to have closed their mind to any debate on this issue. The Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality advised me on 19 June that there were no plans to discuss invest to save projects with local authorities or other key stakeholders. He added that there were
	"no current plans to visit any Invest to Save Budget (ISB) projects or to make a statement."—[ Official Report, 19 June 2006; Vol. 447, c. 1677W.]
	I assume that the Government are proceeding on the basis of an essentially false premise, which is that the sticking plaster of 2004 is no longer needed and that the problem of potential community conflict has gone away. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are enormous potential problems brewing in Peterborough.
	In the summer of 2004, tensions between Portuguese youths and the Pakistani community boiled over into small-scale violence in the Gladstone street area. A further conflagration was avoided only by the quick deployment of the Cambridgeshire police. Recently, there have been problems between the significant Kurdish population in Peterborough, many of whom are asylum seekers or failed asylum seekers, and other ethnic groups.
	That brings me to the substance of the debate. The second Government policy that puts the diverse community in my constituency at risk of major social disorder is a result of inadequate funding for delivering basic local government services. There was the decision alone by the UK, unlike any of the major economies in the EU, not to impose any restriction on migration to the UK after 1 May 2004 of members of the EU accession countries—namely, Cyprus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
	The Prime Minister predicted that only 13,000 such workers would travel to the UK and that the bulk of them would return after a short stay. That was a massive underestimate. Even the Government now admit that more than 400,000 eastern European workers have come to the UK since May 2004. That is 15 times the official prediction.
	Those figures are based on information provided by the workers' registration scheme, a scheme that the respected Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism at the university of Surrey found likely to account for 36 per cent. fewer than the true number of migrants, giving a more indicative figure of 600,000 eastern Europeans having migrated to the UK in the past two years.
	There is substantial evidence, too, that large numbers of migrants bypass the need to register with the workers registration scheme, due to its cost and bureaucracy. The problem with such an unprecedented and arguably unsustainably high level of immigration is that it affects relatively few areas, which are usually urban and outside London. As it stands, the workers registration scheme is largely irrelevant in terms of immigration and border control.
	Currently, no checks are made on the health of migrants, their language skills and other skills, or whether they have criminal records. Indeed, the UK decided not to participate in a European Union scheme, begun in May, to share criminal records data across a number of EU countries. In addition, how can we ensure that we recruit highly skilled workers who will make a vital contribution to the UK economy? The answer to that is: we cannot.
	It would take another Adjournment debate to analyse fully the folly of this Government's immigration and asylum policy. However, I want to focus on the impact on Slough—as well as on Peterborough, of course. I mention Slough because it is experiencing precisely the same problems as we are in Peterborough, but its situation is better documented, in no small measure as a result of the brave and principled stance of the borough's chief executive, Cheryl Coppell. That information gets to the heart of the ways in which unrestricted immigration can have a huge impact on a small geographical area, and on its social mix and economy—especially on the funding available for its local services, heavily dependant as they are on central Government support.
	Reasonably, Slough is challenging official statistics showing that it had a net loss of 3,000 people in the 12 months before 2003-04. Indeed, 9,000 new national insurance numbers have been issued there in the last year. It maintains, as do I, that the methodology for measuring population is outdated and inaccurate. Anecdotally—of necessity—Slough borough council officials maintain that there are 10,000 new Polish residents in the borough, taking advantage of the economic activities in the Thames valley and the supply of cheaper housing in the town.
	Peterborough is in a very similar position, especially as it is a regional hub for agriculture, horticulture and food processing and packaging. According to some estimates at the East of England regional assembly, the number of post-May 2004 migrants from eastern Europe is 16,000—that is in a city of 160,000 people. Yet official statistics state that the number of migrants in Peterborough had fallen by 150 in the 12 months to mid-2004. That would be a moot point, were our funding not so inextricably tied to population statistics, and in particular to the Office for National Statistics population estimates and projections.
	How can the Government contradict that anecdotal figure? They cannot, as they simply have no idea of the extent of migration to, and within, the UK. The independent Statistics Commission has recently written to Ministers—including the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—to express its concern at the inaccuracy of population statistics. However, the Department for Communities and Local Government has refused to act on the matter.
	A letter from Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, which was placed in the House of Commons Library in May 2006, stated:
	"There is now a broad recognition that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing economy, policies and services".
	Glen Watson, director of social reporting and analysis at the ONS, has conceded that at present data on migrant statistics is "limited". Although the ONS has set up a task force on migration statistics, it is unlikely to report for a number of months, and it certainly will not be ready to report in time for the local government financial settlement for 2007-08, to be fixed later this year. Regrettably, without help from central Government, local authorities such as Slough and Peterborough are forced to commission their own research to support their contention that they require extra help as a result of a Government policy over which they have no control, and which costs them scarce and irrecoverable public funds.
	What are the problems in practical terms? The Home Office community cohesion panel, which was set up in the wake of disturbances in northern cities in 2001, reported in July 2004. In its document entitled "The End of Parallel Lives", it stated, inter alia, that
	"inward migration does create tensions and these do not necessarily revolve around race. It is easier for affluent communities to be tolerant towards newcomers as they do not perceive them to be a threat...by contrast, many disadvantaged communities are in competition for scarce resources and public services, such as housing and social services. These fears cannot be disregarded."
	Furthermore, it stated:
	"there are...concerns about the speed at which newcomers can be accommodated. Housing, education, health and other services all take time to expand...The identity of the host community will be challenged and they need sufficient time to come to terms with and accommodate incoming groups, regardless of their ethnic origin".
	Those words could have been written about the Millfield and New England areas of Peterborough, which were hitherto settled and peaceful, if not affluent, but are now at the centre of mass migration. Those areas are not alone in their progressive degradation. They are becoming run down and ghettoised. They are scruffy and more threatening, especially to older people. They have a massively increased number of houses in multiple occupation, with many properties housing eight, 10 or even more eastern European workers. Such people are on the minimum wage and prey to unscrupulous landlords and gangmasters. They are picking vegetables on the fens from 5 am so that they can send money back to their families in eastern Europe. Is that what we want for them, or for the economy of a great city—or indeed the UK? The streets are littered. Rubbish is dumped in back alleys, neighbour disputes are rife and established shops are closing.
	The demand on public services grows each week. There are children at schools such as Dogsthorpe junior school and Beeches primary school who speak no English, but cannot be turned away. There are demands on housing in a city in which there are 6,000 people on the housing waiting list. There are demands on the police to keep disparate communities from conducting turf wars, which prevents them from tackling more routine crime. The police also face the growth of crimes such as drug dealing, casual violence, sex crimes and people trafficking. Resentment, anger and hostility is rising all the time in the host communities—white-British, Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani alike.
	I know that the Minister wants to speak, but I will cite some quotes from just a few people on one street in the Millfield area. One person talks about
	"Gangs outside our houses ... talking and shouting to each other until very late every night".
	Another person says:
	"We all realise we have to live together as peacefully as possible but the disrespect and upheaval these Czech and Slovak families are causing is putting a number of local residents to breaking point."
	A further person says:
	"When I first moved into the area it was relatively peaceful...but in the last 6 months it has become unbearable to live here."
	Another person says:
	"I have a disabled child and the noise and disturbance is causing myself and my family real problems."
	I would like to say that Peterborough city council has acted with the determination and alacrity of Slough borough council, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, the city council neglected to take part in the December 2005 consultation on the sub-regional population projections for England. It is only now preparing to commission its own research, but it is keen to collaborate with authorities in similar situations. With the exception of Councillors Charles Swift and Keith Sharp, who represent the city's North ward, few local councillors have spoken out. Despite having strong leadership at elected member and officer level, a combination of ignorance and inertia has led the city council to make the belated and palpably underestimated guess that only 700 more international migrants now reside in Peterborough than were projected last year, but, of course, it does not really know.
	I will conclude now to allow the Minister to make her comments, although there is more to say. We need the new link project to continue its work. It is needed now more than ever before, so to disband it or dissipate its work would be an act of community vandalism. I hope that Ministers will realise the consequences of their decision on EU migrants prior to May 2004, and the impact that that is having on a small number of localities in respect of the funding of local services and the social dislocation that it is causing. They should do something about the problem. Ministers can help to stave off the pernicious attractions and opportunism of the racist right, with its easy solutions and vicious bigotry, or they can sit back and risk another Oldham or Burnley. I hope and trust that the Government, in the interests of my constituents and the whole community, will make the right choice.